Wireless data communications technology has now found its place in sports and entertainment venues over the past decade. Video and data related to an event at sports venues is now widely available on portable hand held devices such as mobile phones and proprietary devices that can be rented at the sports venues. Wireless communication can be provided to handheld devices via cellular and 802.11 (Wi-Fi) systems. In addition to live video from different perspectives, such as that provided to spectators at sporting events by Kangaroo Media, Inc, of Montreal, Canada (www.kangaroo.tv), social networking, gaming and vending applications are also being provided to spectators. Such systems and applications are well documented in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,149,549, 7,376,388 and 7,620,426, which are herein incorporated by reference for their teaching.
New sports and entertainment venues are now being designed and built to incorporate wireless data communications infrastructure in order to enable enhanced spectator experiences. Examples of such venues include Yankee Stadium, in New York, and Dallas Cowboy Stadium, in Irving, Tex., which have both been enabled with substantial investments in Cisco wireless network technology to enable video and data access for venue attendees using personal hand held devices.
Although new stadiums are being built with wireless capabilities, still many entertainment venues are older and lack the “built-in” wireless data communications infrastructure necessary to support large scale hand held device access to live video recorded by cameras at entertainment venues and associated entertainment data. Furthermore, some entertainment venues may only require temporary installations of wireless video and data communications capabilities for a special event. Also, bandwidth limitations have been experienced where video content is being accessed from a data server over a data network simultaneously by several hand held devices as client within a venue. Several hundred to several thousand clients (e.g., smart phones with Wi-Fi and video capabilities) can be attempting simultaneous access to data from a server, or servers that are located in the same centralized location (e.g., production room) over a public venue's wireless data network. This very large amount of simultaneous data requests locally can result in choppy distribution, server failure or other data distribution issues. For the foregoing reasons, there is a need to provide systems that can enable video and data communications simultaneously with multiple wireless hand held devices for newer and older entertainment venues, and/or for any public venues where data access is only needed temporarily or long-term. The present invention provides a solution for this need.